Monday, 14 March 2011

Taming the Wild Blueberry

Frederick Vernon Coville Field books, 1896-1907, 1924-1934

By Lesley Parilla, Field Book Project

"It is clear that while skimmed milk, buttermilk, casein and whey are useful as fertilizers for blueberry plants, cream and sugar are not. These are still best utilized, in accordance with established practice, on the blueberries themselves fresh from the ice box."[1]

Frederick Vernon Coville (1867-1937), was a botanist and expert in rushes, currants and blueberries. His association with the USDA and Smithsonian spanned forty-nine years, and he authored more than 170 publications. During his career, he took part in expeditions to Arkansas (1888); Death Valley (1891), one of the earliest collecting trips for desert vegetation; and Alaska (1899). He was an important advocate for the creation of the National Arboretum, curator of the United States National Herbarium in 1896 after its transfer from the USDA to the Smithsonian, and honorary curator until his death.

His professional achievements were extensive, but none can be judged sweeter than his success with the blueberry. Prior to Coville’s efforts, blueberries had to be gathered from wild bushes, and rarely grew well outside of Canada and New England. Farmers had determined the plant incapable of being grown commercially.

In 1911, Elizabeth White, daughter of a cranberry farmer in Pine Barrens, New Jersey, read about Coville’s work on blueberries and approached him with an offer to use their farm as a site for his research. Coville used wild blueberry bushes growing along the cranberry bogs of the property, working to determine optimal growing conditions and develop a strong plant with pleasant fruit. Coville discovered that blueberries require unusually acidic soil and cool temperatures to thrive, conditions that would kill most crops. By 1916, they had developed a commercially viable plant. Areas of the country that were unusable for most crops proved optimal for blueberries.

[Fieldbook] Frederick V. Coville Field Book (1898), Oregon

Coville’s work extended well beyond the fruit; as a collector he traveled most of the eastern and western United States, including Death Valley.

Many of Coville's trips resulted in major publications, and he was a recipient of the George R. White Gold Medal of Honor for his lifetime of achievements.

Coville’s field notes provide a variety of detail and context to his collecting. There are several formats from the Death Valley Expedition; basic catalogs of specimens, detailed itinerary, and journal entry style, including descriptions of daily activities, environments of specimen collecting, and detailed lists of plants in surrounding areas. This variety and can be found throughout his field notes. These field notes also include work he completed with such distiguished colleagues as John B. Leiberg (1896), Thomas Henry Kearney (1898-1899), and Frederick Funston (1890-1891).

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While northern St Louis County (MN) is not Canada, it's damn close. I remember my parents going north of Virginia toward International Falls to pick blueberries, leaving us kids behind. They carried big washtubs - the galvanized ones that were about 36-42" in diameter and 18-24" high. They filled them with wild blueberries from the northern swamps in 1 to 2 days of picking. Mom would come home very happy with their success even though this meant a few days of canning. Once she had a freezer she tried to freeze some, but they were never as satisfactory as canned berries for pies.

Mom was a vacuum cleaner kind of picker - once she found a good patch she would pick every berry within reach. Dad (Arthur) was a wanderer - always looking for a better patch after picking off the most fruitful bushes. Once Mom was picking on one side of some bushes and heard some rustling around on the other side. "Are you finding some good berries over there, Art?" Rustle, rustle. (A bit louder because Dad's hearing was not so great. ) "Are finding some good berries over there, Art?" Still no answer. She tried one more time, even louder. No answer, so she got up and stomped around the bush. And came face to face with a black bear. Who was as frightened as she was, but the bear was faster in getting out of there. (It was years later, as a library student taking a Children's Lit. class at the U of Denver when I read Blueberries for Sal and was charmed by the familiarity of the story.)

The Field Book Project is an initiative to increase accessibility to field book content that documents natural history. Through ongoing partnerships within and beyond the Smithsonian Institution, the Project is making field books easier to find and available in a digital format for current research, as well as inspiring new ways of utilizing these rich information resources.